


Ocean's Calling

by lukrezius



Category: Bandom, Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Language Barrier, M/M, joshler - Freeform, mermaid au, merman
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 09:02:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6232576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lukrezius/pseuds/lukrezius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Josh defects from the mer kingdom, and gets caught up in a love story. Oops.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. before

by the sea

You shouldn't leave, his sister says as she powers through the water beside him.  
He didn't mean it, she insists.  
The soldier pulls away from her, her smaller tail no match for his.  
Salt water rushes over his gills, and he revels in the feeling of freedom before being sharply stopped by a hand clutching his dorsal fin.  
You can't leave, his sister insists, close to shouting.  
I can, the soldier replied, emotionless. The first words he'd spoken since making the decision to escape what he'd previously called home.  
Where will you even go?  
He doesn't know, and she sees it on his face.  
Please. You don't know what you're doing.

-

Unknown to them, a white haired storm-shrike, a small wicked demon of sorts, was whipping up a rage of wind and electricity and water. He had seen his victim, floating isolated on a small fishing boat.

A victim by the name of Tyler. 

-

Tyler doesn't allow himself to panic when the waves start lapping over the edge of his boat. He still doesn't panic when a wave flings the boat out from under him, and sends in bodily into the freezing ocean. 

He starts to panic when he's dragged under the surface by a wave, and he struggles amid streams of bubbles to raise his head above the water to breathe. His clothes are a useless weight to him, and he lets his shoes fall off his feet and tumble down into the dark water beneath him. 

Tyler makes a grab for a piece of wood that he's fairly sure was part of his boat, and clings on for dear life. Another wave crashes down on him, and he's probably delirious with fear and salt water consumption and exhaustion but he's also fairly sure he sees a white-haired man flying down the side of a wave towards him.

\- 

The soldier looks up to the roiling surface of the water.  
Is that Way? his sister asks, nervousness creeping into her voice.  
His heartbeat picks up. I think so.  
She anticipates his next move before the thought had fully formed in his head, and she grabbed her brother's tail again.  
No. she said firmly. You're not confronting him now. Wait for father to finish your training.  
I don't need to finish it. I don't need him at all, why don't you understand that?  
With that last word, and hit by a sudden flash of frustration, the soldier twisted his sleek, scaled tail out of her grasp, and curled up through the water away from her, ignoring her desperate cries from behind him.  
She wouldn't follow him. She feared the wrath of the storm-shrike more than the wrath of their father, a mere mer-lord.

The soldier sees the struggling, writhing form of a human above him, worrying far below the water at times as he's thrown about by the ocean. Such frail, brittle creatures, humans.

\- 

Tyler blinks, and the white-haired man is upon him, forcing him down in the water, yet not touching, yet all around him but nowhere near all at once. He thinks he should probably just black out and be done with it all.

\- 

The soldier sees the human body go limp. He sees Way descend on his prey, and he sends a quick prayer to anyone listening and then flings himself forward, into the path of the storm-shrike.


	2. His name is hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> title from semi-automatic from Vessel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shout out to nesi for commenting c; leave kudos and comments for love

Before he's even fully conscious, Tyler half rolls to one side and empties his stomach onto the damp sand. 

Sand. 

Tyler blearily rubs salt from his eyelashes and looks around. He's sitting on the beach, the receding tide lapping at his bare feet. It feels like something crawled into his mouth and died. Swallowing thickly, he gets unsteadily to his feet.

And then he's glad he rolled to the left to throw up, because to his right, half under water, is a man.

A man lying on his back, seemingly naked apart from a mess of rope and cloth tied, toga-like, around his waist and shoulders. The next thing Tyler notices is that his hair is a brilliant, obnoxious pink-red, and that he's probably going to catch hypothermia if Tyler doesn't get him out of the water soon. 

Tyler crouches down next to him, and shakes his shoulder.  
"Hey, dude. You awake? You alive?"   
Tyler peels back an eyelid.  
"Yo."  
He slaps the man's cheek gently.  
"Hello?" 

-

He can't feel his tail. He can't feel his tail. He can feel-  
The soldier bolts upright, and knocks heads with a person- a human, who's for some reason leaning over him, tucking a blanket over him. He's lying on a couch, in this human's house.

He opens his mouth to speak, and finds that he can't. 

The human says something in humanspeak, and gets a blank stare in reply. The human repeats himself and frowns and sits back, onto a table next to the couch. And says something else. 

Then he points to himself, and slowly says, "Tyler."

Tyler. 

The human then points at the soldier, with a questioning look on his face.

Josh frowns, and attempts to explain that he doesn't have a name, he has a number, a designation.

It seems that merspeak is nearly impossible to pronounce above water. 

Tyler looks at him, confused, then points at himself, repeats "Tyler", and then points at the soldier again.

The soldier sighs, then forces out the merspeak word for 'hope'. It's one of the most beautiful words, in his opinion. 

"Josh?" Tyler says, completely mispronouncing the word. 

The soldier sighs again. Sure. Josh. 

He nods. 

-

Josh sits up on the couch, looking over the back of it to where Tyler is doing something. Something that involves pouring a lot of water and banging a lot of things. Josh rests his chin on the back of the couch and watches him through half-closed eyes. 

A growl from his stomach brings him back to reality. He's human. He feels hunger. Josh thinks back to the few humanspeak words that he knows.

-

Tyler spins around when he hears a low voice behind him say, "Food."

"You can talk? You know english?"

Josh looks at him, and repeats himself, slower and less sure this time. 

"Are you hungry? Do you want food?"

"Food."

"Okay. I'll get something."

**Author's Note:**

> a note about the style; I haven't used speech marks because they aren't speaking English, and they are also speaking underwater. also can sorry if you get confused with the pronouns, I don't want to use many names of the mermaids. 
> 
> unbetad so pls point out any mistakes! also my first fic omg :0 if you comment I'll dedicate the next chapter of the next part to you! also idk SHIT about america so..... I'll probably be inconsistent with Americanisms.


End file.
